University Symphony and a Légére reed tryout

Had my first rehearsal with the local university orchestra last week. I've played with them before, and it's always a little nerve-wracking, since the standards are higher. I get invited back, though, so maybe it's not so bad. My best-laid plans to arrive early and get a good warm-up were messed up by dinner delays and weather, resulting in me entering the room with perhaps five minutes to get set. I had a new reed I wanted to use (about which more in a bit), but I wanted to give it a trial before the actual rehearsal. Unfortunately, while unpacking, I dropped it. It didn't chip (thank goodness), but the blades did slip. I've never seen that before, at least not so badly. One blade was displaced 3 or 4 mm. I poked at it, but mostly focused on getting my mainstay reed soaking and my horn together. So much for the new reed. The conductor called for the Bizet, the one piece I'm playing first on. So the other bassoonist and I switched spots, and he asked for the Minuet. Fine, here's the minuet. I hadn't managed to play even a note yet, but that's okay, I essentially never make any adjustments during tuning anyway. For the first section he called, I had rest, so that was fine. Unfortunately, the other bassoonist was playing, everyone else was playing (it was a wind sectional) and my rest didn't make any sense. What? It turns out there are _two_ Bizet Carmen suites, we're playing them both, and they both have a Minuet movement. Oops. I didn't figure it out because I didn't have the music for the other suite. It was in the other bassoonists folder, so we switched the necessary parts, the conductor called the next section, and I'm supposed to enter on a long pp C4 (the one above the staff). I'm not a big fan of this note, I gotta say. Always flat, hard to control, dead sounding without excellent embouchure and reed. Yuck. And playing it soft makes it even worse. I glance at my reed, which I hadn't been planning on using, and it's wide open. Probably great for belting out a tutti forte, but I'm really regretting not getting to rehearsal earlier. I pinch down, trying to close the reed enough to play soft, and do everything I can to keep the pitch up. A horrible, fuzzy, dead, duck-like sound emerged. Pain crossed the conductor's face. It turns out I'd managed to get it sharp, in addition to just sounding awful. After a couple of minutes of playing, things normalized, and the reed behaved fine.

I have been wanting to move on from that reed, though. I've been playing on it for I think six months, which even with my cleaning seems like too long. I've been looking forward to the Légére reeds for awhile. I kind of had dream-like fantasies of synthetic reeds, every one machined to perfection from homogenous engineered material, which would respond beautifully, give control in every register, play in tune with great tone always. Légére has captured a lot of the high-end single reed market, and I didn't see why it couldn't apply to double-reeds too. Because the Légéres were almost here, I'd been postponing putting effort into cane reedmaking, since these skills would soon be outmoded. A couple weeks ago I finally had my chance to try a couple. These had been ordered by a fellow student of my teacher's, an amateur who has done extensive research and investigations on reeds. He had the medium strength, and two to try out. I was really looking forward to it: finally, the end to reed difficulties. The price ($125 ea) is a little eye-popping, but compared to the cost of a bocal or a horn, not totally out of line.

My first impression was terrible. Stiff, and unresponsive. Compared to my mental fantasy, or even my existing mediocre reeds, it was quite difficult to even get a sound out, much less control the sound. I spent a while working with them, since I'd gone to the trouble to get there. They did play, and once the sound was going, the tone was nice. We did some recordings, and comparisons to my cane reed. I'd call the synthetic tone rounder and warmer, where my cane reed was a little more nasal and perhaps a bit buzzier. The synthetic was also louder, which ought to help in projection. The recordings sounded fairly similar: I'm the same player, regardless of the reed, and the tone difference is subtle. But it was just tremendously more work to get the sound out of the synthetic. And I felt it was difficult to control the sound: hard to make beautiful releases, hard to pitch tones where I wanted them. With working that hard just to get a sound, there's not much room left for making beautiful music.

Now, this is not necessarily the reed's fault. My friend had done a certain amount of adjusting of the Légéres, something which they discourage you from doing, but he's definitely a tinkerer. And perhaps it's simply and completely a question of strength: maybe I need soft, and would love a soft Légére. But I think to my son's experience with Légéres on clarinet. He loves the sound, and refuses all other reed types. But he does have trouble with clear articulation. To some extent, that's just something which is hard on clarinet, and perhaps requires more skill than he has. But I wonder if there's a characteristic of the Légéres which makes articulation more problematic.

So there we have it. Légéres exist, they do work, and have a beautiful sound. They don't work well enough for me, though, in the sense that I was hoping that they would solve my issues with responsiveness, not make them worse. I'd be interested in trying a Légére soft at some point, but I'm not sure I want to invest in the experiment just yet. With this tryout in mind, I headed back to the reedmaking room. Worked on getting my knife sharpened, worked on finishing a couple of blanks I had around, one of which was the new reed I wanted to use at the university symphony. The synthetic reeds aren't magic, they exist in the same world as cane, and face the same acoustical problems. If I can figure out how to address these problems with cane, I won't need to worry about synthetic.

Waterlogged!

I think everyone has heard to not let reeds soak too long. "Getting waterlogged" was supposed to wreck the reed, although exactly how was never clear to me. I read something in the IDRS Journal, awhile back, that more or less convinced me that this wasn't possible, that "getting waterlogged" was basically an urban legend. The cane is fully hydrated or it isn't, goes the story, and if it takes on too much water (and how much is too much?) it would suffice to let it dry again. Since then I haven't worried too much about soaking reeds. I'd just soak the whole reed in water for a few minutes before playing, and dip occasionally. I would let them dry after I was done, but if I forgot and left the reed in water overnight, I'd just take it out and play, not obviously the worse for the experience.

Last week, I was away for a few days, and accidentally left my reed in water the whole time. In fact, I took it out only while packing for my rehearsal. Our usual conductor was away that week, and we had a sub, D, a bassoonist. She saw my reed, and remarked on it, saying that just looking at it made her lips hurt. Indeed, it was quite dark with water. I gathered that getting waterlogged makes the reed stiffer. Maybe it was just psychological, being jinxed by her remarks (plus four days without playing) but the reed really bothered me the whole rehearsal. After it dried, the tip looked like the picture: almost entirely flat, and separated and curled up at the corners. I soaked it again, and now it seems to play fine. But still, I don't think I'll let a reed get that soaked again.

An unusual reed

Hard to believe that even plays -- someone posted it to the bassoon reddit, perhaps it was made as a joke. For comparison, the smallest reed in the IDRS Reed Project collection is this one, by Arthur Grossman.

Longer reeds

Last weekend was the annual bassoon event. I played the Telemann again, I'll have to get audio of that up here. Besides that, there was lots of chamber music, recitals, and workshops. One interesting aspect was a piece played by our esteemed guest clinician/soloist. It was a work for solo bassoon and narrator, a retelling of a fairy tale in music and story intended for young audiences. It's a new work, but one not quite done yet, and in fact, we were expected to contribute. After he performed the piece, he went around the room, and asked everyone present to make a couple of comments, one positive and one critique. I gotta say, I paid a lot more attention to the music when I knew I'd have to make a public statement about it! I also learned other random things, such as that you can half-hole the top line A, instead of flicking; and also that our esteemed guest no longer performed the Telemann, due to its endurance demands. I guess that explains why I was so wiped out after performing it.

On reeds. I was chatting with a fellow adult student. He doesn't make reeds, he buys them from a variety of vendors, and adjusts them according to his own theories. Fair enough, gives him more time to practice, I guess. He told me he spent $1500 last year on reeds, which seems like a lot to me. I'd be surprised if I've made even a dozen in the last year. He gave me one of his old reeds to try out, an unwrapped reed from Forrests of a kind that he particularly admires due their very hard cane. It's not new and stock, of course, but rather used, and adjusted according to his theories, which he documented in a thick document he was handing out. I found it unplayable: high crow, stiff, nearly impossible to articulate in the low register. Were it one of my reeds, I'd start shaving off the back, but I think I'd rather leave it untouched as an example of a reed that works for somebody else.

Leafing through his reed document, I was struck by the remark that trimming the tip back to adjust length was a bad idea. He quoted a KJI reeds document, stating that the stability came from the length, and another source along similar lines. This agrees with how I first learned, where you cut off the tip, then weren't supposed to touch the length; only trimming as a desperation measure which would involve remaking the tip region and probably also wrecking the reed. However, when I started with reeds with my current teacher, that went out the window. The cycle is to remove cane, looking for symmetry, response, strength, and balance of sound, and take a sliver off the tip whenever the E drops. Trimming is part of the standard adjustments, so you start longer than you typically want to finish. The end result is I think more or less Philadelphia-style: light and short. However, here was a collection of comments suggesting that shortness leads to instability. This aligns with a remark passed on from the local professional 2nd bassoonist, who suggested to my teacher that he might try out longer reeds.

Inspired by that, I took a reed off my rack that's been being ignored for a few months. I must've done some work on it, because the tip was cut off, but the opening was wide and likely there was lots of cane. I squeezed both wires a lot to get the tip opening reasonable, and tried playing it for awhile. It worked surprisingly okay. More stable? Quite possibly. I measured the length, something I rarely do, and it was 30 mm from 1st wire to tip. My basic reed for the past few months measured at about 26mm. Huge difference, but both entirely playable. Very interesting.

The architecture of the bassoon reed

Barrick Stees has a great series of posts up on the physical mechanics, kinetics, aerodynamics and acoustics of the bassoon reed: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I've read many of the same sources, and I'm not sure I'd agree with every statement there (eg, the larger cross section of a more rounded wires would, I'd guess, lead to lower flow rates, less vorticity, and lower flow resistance, contrary to the statement in the "wind tunnel" post, but aerodynamic resistance may not be the same as what a reedmaker/user means as "resistance"), but nevertheless, I think we desperately need this kind of thinking to guide new ideas in reeds. More later, I hope.

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Légère bassoon reeds!

Check it out: Légère will be adding bassoon reeds to their commercially available synthetic reeds. Their clarinet reeds have been very successful. James Campbell is a strong advocate, and told me that for some European orchestra (Berlin?), Légère had converted not just one player, but the entire section. But the architecture of a single reed is simpler than a double reed, and the last time I checked, they hadn't been able to solve the complications in manufacturing the reeds. Evidently, that has changed. I've added my name to the waiting list. I'm pretty excited, this could be big.

This is what I get for working on reeds

Split all the way to the wire, before it had ever been played. I don't even know when it happened, I flipped it over and there it was. Maybe (evidently?) I was using too much tool pressure, I was trying to take material off fast.

How a cleaned bassoon reed ages

The upper reed is my main reed at the moment. Actually, because I'm lazy, it's basically the only reed I've been using. I've been playing on it for months, probably at least hundred hours or so. I'm careful to sonicate my reeds after every use, so I can get away with this. In high school, before I cleaned reeds, I remember them going off much more quickly; going first stuffy and then dead. I think the usual aging mechanism is that the reed surface gets clogged with dead skin cells from the lips. This slimy stuff deadens the vibration, and maybe contributes to bugs growing which can eat away at the reed.

The lower reed is a new reed I'm working on finishing. The old reed is still working, but I'm getting worried about it. The color is getting darker, maybe the pitch is rising, and I'm feeling like some of my problems are the reed's fault. Having a new one on hand gives me a comparison, to see how the old one has aged. I arranged the light in the picture to try and demonstrate the difference in texture between the reeds. The old reed has developed grooves between the white cellulose fibers. I'm not sure what the material between the fibers is, maybe lignin, but whatever it is, it seems to be lost faster than the white fibers. I should check the interior of the old reed when I discard it, see if a similar effect is occurring on the interior.

Modding an ultrasonic cleaner

Here's the new button on my ultrasonic cleaner, mostly installed by my son. The old one failed, as I mentioned earlier. The new one is working fine, so far, and it should be more reliable than the original, since the connection doesn't go through the hinge. However, the cleaner was out of commission for a couple of weeks while we got around to doing it. This gave me a chance to see if the cleaner is actually doing any good, or if zapping reeds in this thing is just another waste of time. And, well, I guess I expected my reed to start getting cruddy eventually, but I had no idea how fast. Within a couple of days, a layer of slime had started to build up on the back of the reed. Gross! Is this what the rest of the world is putting up with? Me, I started to try and scrub my reed under fast hot water after every use, and I'm glad to get my cleaner back online.

Alien reed making

Looking for reed instruction, I found this set of videos (here is complete set), showing how to make a bagpipe reed. It's very strange to watch, because some things are the same: it's a double reed, and shares the same physics of sound production, so on any planet, there'll be certain things which remain constant. The bagpipe is a different instrument than the orchestral double reeds, so some things have to be different: the reed is enclosed, so there's no interaction with embouchure; the air comes from a bag, the range is small and uses no overblowing. However, there seems to be no overlap with the cultural history of double reed making. In particular, there's a near total absence of specialized tools: no reed knife, no gouging or profiling machine, etc. The tools he does have he's made himself: a forming mandrel for the staple, which he filed out of a nail, the easel, the bed he gouges the cane in. Very interesting.

Turk's head

This is the first Turk's head I've ever wrapped, done at my lesson a couple weeks ago. I've been playing for 29 years. As it turns out, making that ball of string isn't as hard as I'd thought all this time.

A DIY profiler

Here's a profiler made out of particle board, old pipe, and a Dremel tool. You'd think this wouldn't be stiff enough to meet the specifications required for high quality profiling, and you'd be right: the maker thinks 0.1mm is required, and this doesn't meet it. Hertzberg's profilers were made to a tolerance of 1/10000 of an inch, which at 2.5 µm is about 40x higher than 0.1mm. To me this seems silly, you're still going to be dominated by variation in the cane even at a much lower tolerance. Still, this profiler is a 2D profiler, mimicking the template both along and across the blade, and might conceivably be superior to no mechanical profile at all.

The rest of his site is interesting too. He's an analytically minded amateur, like myself.

Back to reeds

This is my favorite reed tool. It's the ultrasonic cleaner I got awhile back, designed for jewelry, but used by many players. Since I became convinced that the primary aging mechanism for reeds is becoming encrusted with foreign matter (mostly skin cells from the lips), I've been pretty religious about cleaning my reeds with this after every use. Hot water is better, with a bit of dish soap to help cavitation get started. Last fall sometime I found that one of my reeds played much better than the others. Mindful of the advice to practice only on good reeds, rather than treasuring it and continuing to spend hours making new reeds, I decided that I'd progress faster by spending my time practicing while playing only on my best reed. I started this in I think October, and played that reed basically exclusively until mid-February, so perhaps 16 weeks. At ten hours of playing a week, it was good for some hundreds of hours of playing. Not bad, I should post a picture of that hardy little reed. (It came from a piece of Neuranter cane, so I ordered some more of this today.) This reed did start to die, though, and adjustments seemed to start fraying the tip, so I moved on. At my lesson last night M tried to smooth out some of my work on the newer one. The E kinda dropped, and F was unstable. something I'd noticed in my tape of the Mozart rehearsal too, though I didn't notice at the time. Cropping it back didn't help much, and we eventually decided it was just too soft cane. Next week we'll only be working reeds, so I'd better try and finish a few to bring in and fix up. I have a few sitting on tips, waiting for finishing, and I also have a few pieces that have been soaking for weeks, waiting for me to find time to form tubes. Too many projects, not enough energy.

Weekly goals

Weekly lessons are going to be tough. It's now fall, so schedules will be more regular, so I'll miss fewer lessons due to mismatches, and will need to be prepared on a weekly basis for whatever I'm presenting that week. This isn't very many practice sessions to develop and learn whatever major concepts or changes I need to do based on the previous lesson. So maybe being specific week-to-week will help.

This week, my goal is to not spend a week slowly ramping up the metronome, then get stopped after the first note to talk tone for half the lesson. So relaxation, embouchure, air, throat, conception of tone and hearing the goal before playing. Probably this means everything slower than I'd like, *sigh*, but maybe the sound will be better.

Started working reeds again. Threw a couple away without much work, which is a milestone. I had better blanks on which to spend my time, and I guess I've learned that construction problems can't really be fixed. G9 was one, it felt giant, I guess it was one of my wide experiments. XX was the other, the cane slipped at the shoulder. Currently fighting Nxx, trying to get it acceptably soft without killing E3. At the moment it's both tubby and too hard, which seems like a contradiction, but there it is.

More materials for reeds and bocals

I previously wrote about a successful synthetic clarinet reed, based on a anisotropic polymer. They aren't the only one, Fiberreed is another, based on what they call a "Hollow Fiber Foamresin Compound", a composite of hollow fibers encased in foam to provide an appropriate balance of lateral and longitudinal stiffness. Sounds plausible. Some of their models incorporate carbon fiber, which interests me, since carbon fiber is one of the strongest and stiffest materials, and dominates a lot of applications. In addition to the usual benefits of artificial materials (no water absorption, longevity) Fiberreed promises reproducibility, and will custom adjust a new reed to match your favorite reed of any type, and then sell you a new copy anytime you want. Like Legere, Fiberreed is single reed only, which I'd guess reflects partly manufacturing simplicity, and partly market size -- there's a lot of sax players out there. Fibracell is another maker, again with a fiber composite, this one with Kevlar and resin, and there are likely more besides.

Bocals are also heavily affected by material, with makers offering a wide range of metal mixes and thicknesses, in addition to lengths and bore variations. (Heckel lists ~6000 stock combinations, even before you start asking about something custom.) Unfortunately, even the best makers seem to suffer wide variability among nominally identical bocals, so the usual advice is to try many, and try them blind as to maker and model. Other materials used include wood, from Paraschos, which seems to make everything out of wood (even clarinet ligatures!). As for carbon fiber, you can buy carbon fiber sax necks from Zen Composites, and Leonardo Fuks has made at least one carbon fiber prototype bocal, shown here. Hard to tell much about how well it works from that short clip, though.

Reed disaster

I have a show tomorrow, playing one short piece my son wrote for a creative music competition. So it kinda matters, it's all solo and it'd be nice to not suck, and I'd been working a pretty good reed for it, G11. The piece goes all over the place, starting with low Bb1, and hitting C4 later, and I need to compete against his rather vigorous piano playing in all registers. So it's not an easy piece for a reed. I'd been trying to get a little more response, a little more brightness, and also clean up a moderately bad top/bottom assymmetry. A touch off the front of the heart, trying to smooth the side profile, seemed to help. And how bout a bit from the back to help those low notes... A bit here, a bit there... And bam. The middle C#, C#2, in the staff, dropped, turning into a C-natural. Eeeyeah. And I lost the ability to hit C4 securely. If a high E or D# won't speak on a reed, I'll forgive it, no serious biggie, but a C is not that high. There's no real help here but to clip back the tip, to bring the reed's internal pitch up again. My first clip went askew, and after I'd gotten it straight, the reed looked awfully short, about 24.5mm collar to tip. It feels very small in my mouth, like it's amputated. And while it does kind of play, it's nevertheless too stiff in the tenor range, doesn't speak all that well low... and if I fix those things, I worry I'll get stuck where I was before.

Not sure what I'll do. I have a couple of other reeds, G5 and G7, which are both playable. Neither are as good as G11 was just before I screwed it up. Guess I'll decide tomorrow what to do.

Added. I played on G5, which was my concert reed in the last couple of weeks, before I was finishing G11. I took a bit of the back, hoping to let the low notes speak a little more freely, but basically tried to leave it alone, having fewer and worse backups left. As it turns out, we got to play the piece twice, since the adjudicator hadn't received the full score and needed more time to get familiar with the music before judging it. Different mistakes each time, an odd squawk here and there, but I got through it. I played standing too, my first time performing that way. I found it not easy, since the instrument is less balanced than when seated, but it's nice to be able to move. And oh yeah -- the piece won.

Added again: Here's audio, with a new cloud audio system.

Moose in Love by TFox17

Environmental effects

I had an interesting experience in the impact of weather on reeds, something I guess I've heard of, but hadn't really believed. I'd practiced yesterday morning, and my reed (G5) was behaving. But the day was hot, reaching +33 C in the afternoon. Here that often brings rain. I had a rehearsal in the evening, and we heard thunder, and rain came through. And my reeds were terrible. Fuzzy, difficult to make respond. They turned funny shapes too, and closed down. I switched to G7, which is a little lighter, and that helped a bit, but I struggled through the whole rehearsal. My sinuses felt stuffed too, whether that's due to the playing or the weather I don't know. This morning is cooler, overcast, but with a muggy, oppressive feel. I feel like I'm in Europe, London or Paris or something. Or San Diego, which often felt this way. But that's what the weather looks like, why would it affect the reed?

Here are some plots of weather conditions over the past day.









The rain began around the start of my rehearsal at 1900, right in the middle of these plots. The shifts in temperature, wind and humidity are substantial on these scales. The pressure, which seems like a natural candidate to impact acoustics, doesn't change all that much, going from 100 to 100.5 kPa, a 0.5% shift. The humidity, on the other hand, changed from 20% to 70%, which is more than a factor of 3. So is it the humidity? Dunno. It's not obvious to me how that would work. After all, the reed gets fully saturated with water when it's soaked, so why would a slight shift in external humidity change its shape or properties? Or would it be due to the humidity in the air column of the instrument bore? That air is all exhaled breath, which I'd think is generally saturated with water vapor regardless of the external humidity. Curious.

R7 and R8

Unwrapped, wired and numbered R7 and R8. I'm working towards the end of my Rigotti cane, will need to think about buying more. R6 I last touched in January, when I thought I might be able to make two reeds a week. Haven't gotten there, not close. 4 months=16 weeks, and I've made, ooh, well I'm playing on G7 and G14 is sitting on the desk. So I've made about 15 reeds, or two every two weeks.

Also formed tubes on two sticks of Neuranter cane. My previous luck wasn't so great with this cane, we'll see if I do any better after a bit of experience. If not, I won't get more, since its price is a fair bit higher, and I don't find it fun to work on cane that costs $5 a stick.

G12, G13, and G14

Unwrapped, wired, and numbered. I'm trying to do production, but every reed ends up an experiment anyway:

G12. Maybe I got a little too excited beveling near the butt, inspired by the Herzberg bevel. Noticed some separation along the rails, near the midpoint down the blade.

G13. I found some 22 gauge brass wire at the home center, and was happy to have a local source to replenish my dwindling wire supply. Only later noticed that it's just brass, not soft brass. Tried it on this reed, and while it does work, it takes more force, and puts more force on the reed. I guess there's a reason soft brass is preferred. I cut the rest of mine into 7 cm pieces for convenient use later.

G14. This was the one dried on the forming mandrel.

Scoring

Before the tube is formed, I score the cane with a single-edge razor, held by hand, with the cane supported by an easel. I go from the first wire to the butt, about half-way through. The idea is to allow the cane to bend in a controlled manner, without cracking (and especially without cracks extending into the blade). It's my least-favorite step, in all of reedmaking. It's difficult to hold the blade, and make straight cuts. The blade goes too deep half the time (though many say that the score should go all the way through near the butt). There are gizmos, such attaching several blades together (eg Vigder's), or the Bonazza machine sold by Miller Marketing.


I did have a thought, though, suggested by Robin Howell's reed page, where he calls it kerfing. Now kerfing is a standard woodworking method of creating large bends, where you remove material with cuts from the inside of the curve, not the outside. If you did this with a bassoon reed, you could leave the bark intact, for a perfect natural seal, with the strain relieved by cuts in the interior. I tried this with a scrap, using the edge of a file to try and make the cuts. It didn't work very well, with not much material removed, just compressing ruts into the cane. When I made a tube, I got several cracks, as if I'd done no scoring at all. Maybe it could be done better, or maybe the bark itself is inflexible enough that it needs to be cut.